The battle's on as the Black Order holds its annual fundraiser, pinning girls against guys in a fight for the top prize! However, drama ensues as Lenalee finds herself working at a maid cafe and Allen struggles to win back Lenalee's approval. *Allena*

A/N: Holy crap, I'm still alive! YAY! I am SO SORRY, for a number of reasons. First of all, I'm very sorry that this took so long to get out. However, due to the fact that I had to travel to Japan, am battling with some seriously depressing personal issues, and have a ballet exam and loads of other shit coming up, it's pretty safe to say that I have not had all the time in the world to complete my writing! So, please excuse my tardiness T^T

Also, I apologize for not posting anything on Valentine's Day, I seriously feel terrible about that. I was in Japan on Valentine's Day, so my mind was all fucked over (from jet lag) and I hardly ever knew what day it was, so, when I found out that it was Valentine's and I had no way to write and super cute, super fluffy AllenxLenalee... I... I nearly died. Actually, I did die. WHAT KIND OF A FAN AM I? But I did write this really sappy piece of shit on dA, I posted it in a journal (sinceI felt so terrible about it), but I don't reccomend you read that. But I still feel bad, I mean, its the first time since I've begun writing fanfiction that I haven't written anything for V-Day! WAHHH!

So, anyways, if this story is not as well-written as before, gomenasai. Really. But please, please do enjoy, if that is at all possible... wahhh...

Allen was quite certain that, if he had had his eyes gouged out by a spoon and refilled with wasabi-soaked jalapeno peppers, he would've been in less pain than he was in right now.

Because right now, he was twitching like a half-dead centipede beneath the smothering, grinding glares of Lavi, Bookman, Shifu, and Rikei. He could almost hear the ticker within all four of them, on the verge of detonating into a gut-blowing, manner-spanking explosion, one which would no doubt buffoon every customers' face into an expression of thoroughly appalled unawareness. At that moment, glomping Kanda while under the influence of sugar seemed more appealing than serving these 'four' an assortment of artificial looking pink digestibles.

And then, Lavi whistled. He just had to. One of those shrill, hot-saucy whistles of lusty approval, usually used to signify to every audible person that this particular piece of eye candy was worthy of hopping into bed with whichever man had been lame enough to twittle the tune. But, although this was, under any normal circumstances, quite normal behaviour for a playboy such as Lavi, Allen knew far too well that it hadn't been meant as a perverted compliment towards his ass.

His friends, however, seemed to find it quite hilarious; the entire table immediately erupted into a gale of laughter, waterworks, fist-pounding and all. It was like a line-up of laughing dominos, really, how, once one spewed the first spurts of laughter, the others all instantly followed suit, a contagious string of immaturity flinging them all into a chaotic canon of gut-splitting hyena laughter that even the most highly-trained animal trainer couldn't crack a whip at. But that was just typical guy behaviour.

Yet, despite this sympathetic masculine awareness, Allen couldn't help but feel completely alienated from the likes of his fellow male counterparts; taking a hollow, highly perturbed, on-the-verge-of-turning-into-a-warrior-cry breath, he held his chin high as he stared down at the four people he had decided he never wanted to see again for the rest of his life. Ever. The laughter eventually regressed to a mildly tolerable level of snickering.

"Okaerinasaimase… go… go…" his dignity would not allow him to say the words.

The urge to finger Lavi with all the manly immaturity he could produce had reached a critical point. "Okaerinasaimase, goshujin-sama!" How he had managed to produce a super bubbly, fantastically high-pitched voice capable of generating visible sparkles was a mystery he never hoped to crack. Lavi, upon being gunned down by the unexpectedly girl power-charged rebuttal, had adopted a look of pure gobsmack.

"Uhh…" Allen was realizing just a little too late that he had no idea what to say or do next. "I'll go, um, get you some cups of poison, my wonderful goshujin-sama… !"

He left the group of men behind with a stumble, his maid skirt flying up behind him with disturbing sass; almost immediately, the room turned into an auditory mosh pit of monstrous, boomingly over-the-top hollering. Again. Apparently the other customers hadn't been satisfied enough with the state of deafness achieved from the previous outburst.

But before he even had the chance to run for cover, Alice had shoved a tray of frothing pink drinks in his hand.

"Uhh…" his mouth remained openly sucking in air as he attempted to distinguish whether the drinks were really, truly edible. "What exactly are these… liquid… cups of… pink... stuff?"

"Well its Toxically Moe's specialty beverage, of course," she dismissed him as if it were the most blatantly well-known fact the world had ever known. "Its chalk full of fuwa fuwa goodness and has just a hint of moe toxicity!"

A sparkler went off in his head, fizzling into an idea of vengeful deliciousness. "Moe toxicity, you say?"

"The most potent, ovary-energizing toxicity you'll ever come across!"

Sounded like a glass full of suicide to Allen. However, that did not by any means stop him from swiftly (or rather, with an awkward sort of flounce) serving up the mystery concoctions to his oh so wonderful table. In fact, he had discovered an unhealthy eagerness burning within him at the prospect of seeing a bug-eyed Lavi rolling about the floor with pink foam spewing from his mouth after he drank what he hoped to be cups of carcinogenic goodness. Or at least, that's what he hoped the moe poison could accomplish…

"Here's your drinks," he grumbled darkly, plunking each cup onto the table with the very deliberate intention of making each one spill half its contents. Lavi was the first to comment on his extremely unmoe-like serving skills.

"No seriously, you're gonna love this," he gestured for him to come closer, and, although every fibre of his intuition was face-palming at the action, he felt himself fall victim to Lavi's demand.

Regret didn't even have a chance to contaminate his conscience before Lavi had shoved his hand down Allen's top, scrounging around for the source of Allen's newborn 'chest'; he had never felt so utterly exposed in his life.

Which is why Allen decided now would be a brilliant time to test out the benefits that came with his new gender. Forcing his eyes to transform into pools of gooey doe-eyed alarm, he sucked back a large chunk of air as he readied his voice to transform into a female rape alarm.

"HELP SOMEBODY HELP, I'M BEING SEXUALLY HARRASSED, HELP ME HELP ME HELP ME!"

Amidst having his chest searched, his vocal chords working at maximum capability, and toilet paper flung into his face, the surprise at actually having a pair of hands wrap around him and powerfully pull him away from Lavi's perverted finger search party was extremely riveting; in a very wrong, wrong way. Actually, being saved so swiftly was about ten times freakier than actually having Lavi abuse his image in front of the entire restaurant's gawking eyes (which at the moment, seemed hungrier than their stomachs). What the fuck had he done?

"Are you okay, Miss?"

Oh shit; he knew that voice. A strand of neurons right within his memory bank were whipping him in the skull, blatantly informing him of the wonderful news with mighty cracks of nausea. With proactive regret he glanced up at his knight in shining armour, only to lock eyes with a genuinely concerned, fully immersed in hero-mode, Bak.

A sound that could only be described as a gender-confused squeal came from Allen's mouth; Bak actually thought... had actually... thought... he was a girl. Allen Walker had actually been confused for a girl. The world was more fucked up than he had ever imagined it to me. How naïve he had been before, thinking that people actually had some goodness within them. His soul gave an ashamed sigh of frustration as he wriggled about pitiably.

"Do I know you from somewhere, Miss?" the Asian branch chief was now looking at him with an expression that quite simply made Allen want to turn into an invisible puddle of tasteless, shapeless somatic juice. But hey, at least it hadn't been Fou who'd seen him...

"Um…" right then, Allen had three options available; he either a) could transform into Crowned Clown and strangle the life right out of Bak until he was certain he had suffered irreversible amnesia, b) could continue to scream and fuss like an ecstatically depressed fangirl in the hopes of getting Lavi arrested, or c) he could ever so simply say…

"... good-bye."

The verbal hit and run was performed with the brilliance of an uncomfortably androgynous individual, his voice cracking as it tried to continue the feminine charade against the will of his dignity. But honestly, right then, Allen couldn't give a shit how ridiculous he looked; he just wanted to go die. Alone. In a shower, where he could fully perform his wall-hitting, model pouting, bent over and crippled 'To be, or not to be' act while remaining shirtless (just in case a female walked in) and trying not to think about how much better it would've looked in the rain. The emo shower had never seemed like such a refreshing option.

Yet as these gothic ideas progressed with self-loathing definition through Allen's head he found himself subconsciously wriggling loose from Bak's grip, until finally, once he had adjusted his focus to be solely dedicated to the task of removing himself from the public eye, he popped right out of Bak's embrace, like a party cracker blown open by some idiot before the New Year's countdown even finishes. Scrambling towards the door, his feet fried the floor into sizzling wooden bacon strips as they identified the distant safety of the 'Staff Only' area. He didn't care if Alice was waiting for him with a sparkly pink frying pan, didn't care if Link was ready to jot down his incompetence at being a maid of sickening moe ability, all he cared about was getting through that damn door and…

"Wait, what's your nam—"

Bak was rudely intercepted by the slamming of the door; Allen had successfully escaped the pit of identity assassinating customers. He nearly slid down its wooden frame in shaky, hallelujah-soundtracked relief.

Cutting through the relief, however, was the one thing that had been bulging in his mind, in big, twinkling bubble letters that looked about ready to explode, since the second he had slipped on his pantyhose and garters; it rolled off his tongue with haughty fatigue.

"Alice, I qui—"

"ALLENA-CHAN YOU CAN'T BE IN HERE RIGHT NOW GET OUT!"

The blunt potency of the rejection bred his thoughts into a mis-weaved quilt of flimsy cognitive threads, those of which were quite incapable of cushioning any thoughts as he attempted to figure out why he couldn't possibly be allowed in the 'Staff Only' area. And then he saw Lenalee, sitting in a chair, looking like she both desperately wanted to hide yet at the same time wanted someone to see and comfort her. It almost looked like… wait, was she crying?

Apparently his ability to leisurely think over commands was not at an acceptable speed for Alice, because she was now stalking towards him with a look of predatorial disgust (something quite common to the female species), and looked about ready to sample his insides.

"What don't you understand about GET OUT?"

"But I just want—"

"GET THE FUCK OUT!"

He was forcefully thrown out of the room with the most unsympathetic act of womanly consent he had ever had the delight of experiencing.

And, as the door screamed shut behind him, he figured his welcome back to hell wasn't going to be any more compassionate as he was re-welcomed by Lavi's smirking face.

"Okay honey, just let it allll out."

Lenalee began to choke on her own sniffles; holding back tears had never felt like such a mortifying experience. Especially in front of someone like Alice. Not that she was a mean girl or anything (or at least, purposefully mean), just that, when you looked at Alice, the intuition just knew, with that little wriggle of well-concealed disquiet, that she was the type of girl who knew everybody's secrets, secrets ranging from trivial fluff to large-scale terrorist plots on the self-esteem. Alice just had that look, that presence about her, that suggested she knew it all. And that, specifically, was why Lenalee wasn't too keen on 'spilling her innermost thoughts' to her fellow co-worker, for the sake of her reputation and her peace of mind.

Although the latter, currently speaking, seemed to be on the verge of extinction...

"Aww Lena-chan, don't cry!"

"I'm not crying!" she turned her head away from Alice, tears forming unstable squiggles down her face.

"Do you honestly think I didn't notice?" she was now kneeling before her, the reek of super expensive, aromatically flirtatious perfume assaulting Lenalee's nose with dense aromatic viscosity. "I could tell the second you stepped out of that bathroom honey," she heaved herself gracefully atop the counter, legs crossed and bloomers liberally visible. "Now spill, or I'll start guessing."

The fear of having her deepest, darkest feelings of feigned foreignness put into words for her… it was too much. Much much too much. Especially with someone as erratic as Alice being the MC. Lenalee was left with no other choice but to tiptoe past the borders of her comfort zone and reveal some of her troubles to the girl now sitting across from her.

"I just... I just..." she could feel the words all huddled up in her throat, petrified and shivering as they saw the light outside her mouth, forming an invisible clot that didn't want to budge for fear of having their true identities revealed. Talking to someone about her private emotional battles, about the stupid little spats her conscience and rationality would get into over trivial bits of life, seemed like such a taboo thing. Especially to another girl. The lethal levels of awkwardness in doing that would be so toxic to the confidence. She had just never been built to leak her insecurities and traumas like that. Lenalee's body had been well-insulated against sharing that kind of stuff. For as long as she dared remember, she had always trained her body to patch away the invisible hurts and pains whenever they threatened to sabotage the air's chaste honesty, due to the fact that no suitable ears had ever really been around to listen to them anyways. Now, it was just habitual. It was autonomic.

But was… was it really okay?... to another… girl…

Come to think of it, she never actually had revealed her innermost feelings to another girl before. The opportunity to had simply never appeared in her life, forcing Lenalee to cap everything off and put on a strained grin amidst her male comrades, even during the peak season of her inner emotional storms. This experience was kind of... kind of freaky.

"I just don't know what to do anymore."

Instead of spastically shooting her a response of urgent inquiry further into the topic (which was the response Lenalee had anticipated), Lenalee was instead taken off-guard as Alice's arms wrapped around her, pulling her into a comforting, soft embrace that was so full of understanding, so rich in sensationalistic reassurance, that she actually felt her muscles fall into a peaceful state of relaxation, like one of those shaky breaths that come after partaking in an unforeseen emotional catharsis. The little seedling of anxiety that had been rotting within her had suddenly begun to bloom into a blossom of relief.

Her arms wrapped around Alice, free from thoughts' propagandizing influence.

"I know how scary it can be, Lena-chan."

Her words punctured deep into her emotional insulation.

"Falling in love with a friend kinda feels like having the entire Milky Way spill its milk on you."

"Maybe not verbally, but your face did," Alice assured, her voice still emoting a sort of relatable understanding. "Honey, I've been through it all, trust me."

Firing back a phrase of defence somehow seemed pointless.

"And besides, you have your period right now, so of course everything's gonna seem like it's been painted in poison."

Lenalee nearly felt her uterus disintegrate at the statement. How the hell did she...

"How did you know I had my period?" Even just saying the word 'period' made her feel like she had blood blotches splattered across her ass. Panic-stricken, she stood up, eyes searching frightfully for even the faintest stain of red.

"Chill out, would you?" Alice was now back on her feet, forcefully reacquainting Lenalee's ass with the chair. "You don't have any marks, I swear."

She felt her muscles sigh.

"I'm just an expert on these kinda things, so I can totally tell when a girl's ragging."

"R-Ragging?" Lenalee's voice graduated an octave.

"My god, was it really that bad?"

"Was what that bad?"

"Your acceptance!"

"My acceptance?"

"Your acceptance into womanhood!"

"MY WHAT?"

Manicured hands placed atop her shoulders, Alice's face was now aligned directly across from Lenalee's, so as to create the perfect artificial mirror image. "Tell me everything. Right from the start."

Lenalee suddenly felt as if she had had scalding hot tea pumped down her throat. With a syringe. Yet, once it had sloshed down, as she was bracing herself to have the slimy flesh covering her throat fried into crispy sheets of tempura tissue… she had found it to feel kinda soothing. "So you mean... when I..."

The wink Alice gave her sealed the deal.

"Well, I guess it was three years ago..."

The saying 'Death was knocking at your door' had never seemed so terrifyingly real. Lenalee had always visualized some sort of akuma like creature as being Death. She had vowed to her big brother that one day, she would exorcise him with her very own two heels. That way, Death would never ever bother them again.

But to think that Death...

To think that Death had finally come knocking at her door. Her door. Lenalee Lee's god damn door. Fuck, look at how pathetically young she still was. It couldn't be the end already. It just couldn't. She'd have rather died on the battlefield, amidst a graveyard of gaseous akuma carcasses, than by sitting on the toilet with her underwear pulled halfway down her legs. It wasn't fair. It just wasn't fucking fair.

She had abandoned the imaginative idea of Death being a living, breathing creature a few years back, but to have him staring at her—literally, staring— right in the face, waving at her with this sort of mocking, cacophonous silence that sent the ears into a screaming fit of muted, blood vessel popping terror...

There he was, bright red and wet on her panties. A big, bloody blob of muck. The seal to her death sentence. On her underwear. There was no other explanation for it. She was surely, unstoppably, without exception, dying.

"N... Nii-san..." Lenalee's voice was a shaky grovel, an audible manifestation of her intense petrification at the sticky red goop now coating her panties and oozing out of her vagina like heated toothpaste. "Nii-san..."She hadn't been ready for this. She hadn't been ready to die.

Although, actually, now that she thought about it, Death had given her hints about his arrival.

It had started about a week ago.

Lenalee had unexpectedly been overcome with excruciatingly brutal, stabbing pangs, pangs that would delicately resonate deep within her gut and spread their seething wealth before fizzling into a more manageable ache. The moment she had first experienced one of these pangs she had immediately keeled over and clutched at her waist, thoughts of her stomach trying to eat itself terrorizing her mind into a fitful state of over-stimulated fantasy as she bit her mouth for reasonless support. The people around her had all flocked to her aid, treating her ears to words of concern and care, but Lenalee had managed to contract enough calmness to laugh it off as being a stubbed toe. However, she had later realized, as the pains continued to make love with her nerve endings, that they weren't originating from her stomach at all, but in fact, were coming from somewhere even deeper, somewhere even more taboo and delicate to think and speak about...

She had decided that her ovaries were somehow tearing apart. Maybe they had contracted some sort of disease, a disease where they'd swell to a size that'd make a balloon envious, and they were slowly, ever ever so slowly, ripping apart into bits of muscle-y confetti. It seemed so ludicrous, yet how else was she supposed to explain such debilitating stabs of pain? They'd just go on and on, like a tangible moan that droned on and on and on and never varied in pitch or intensity or melodrama, it just went on and on...

But that hadn't been the only hint. Something else unexplainable had happened, an event that had made Lenalee cry herself to sleep and then, after waking up from a sore back, caused her to throw her pillow at the wall in a fit of sudden unsubstantiated rage, complete with hot tears and trivial rhetorical nuisances that just wouldn't leave her alone, it all just hit her and slapped her until the stapling of her ovaries almost felt like a physical form of relief from the bipolar identity crisis of her emotions. Jesus, why had she been such a bitch? Why why why?

She… she had yelled at Komui. The reason for their disagreement seemed so bitingly stupid, it had made Lenalee even angrier at herself, but that hadn't stopped her at the time from performing a full-on soap opera performance in the dining hall, at the Order, in front of everyone.

He had told her she should try wearing something that wasn't always black. Black. Her favourite color. Even if it wasn't a color, Lenalee still chose to devote herself to it, because she could relate to its faraway loneliness and felt ashamed that other people merely saw it as a shade rather than for the complex color that it really was, so full of deeply buried secrets and inconceivable mysteries. But to think that her kind-hearted, ever-conscious Nii-san had even had the nerve to try and suggest to her to wear something other than black... it was like the racist of all racist accusations against a color. Ever. And so, after going off on a rambling, scarily uncharacteristic tangent about how black made her look good and that obviously if she didn't look good he should keep it to himself and that the entire world must've thought she looked like shit if he thought she looked like shit in black and that she'd never show her face again if that was the case, Lenalee had declared her 'never talking to him again' line, and stalked out of the dining hall with every eye gagging on the sight.

So really, after all that, she should've known she was dying. All along, Death had been sending her such kind little hints, itty bitty little presents that had all collaborated in making her life a living hell until finally, the grand finale had arrived. And it couldn't have made a more shocking entrance. Death sure was a sneaky little bastard. Her lower back seemed to groan in agreement. In fact it seemed as if all her emotions were currently connected to some kind of physical trigger-switch, ensuring that, whenever she was pissed off (which seemed to be far too often, and with such pointless reason), she'd be sure to have a double-dose of ovary-searing pain at the same time. How crafty, Death was. Very fucking crafty indeed.

And now, she had to break the news to her brother.

She had already begun configuring a variety of ways to try and break the news to Komui, ranging from just outright telling him about her unexplainable symptoms to wrapping up her soiled undies in a pretty little box, tying a nice explanatory note to it, and dropping it off on his desk. And yet, no matter what she came up with, every way was certain to entail Komui clinging to her like an embarrassing little leech and proclaiming to the (non-listening) world that he'd never let go of her, that he would sacrifice his own life in place of Lenalee's or that he would die right along with her if the heavens were to insist. At the moment, such an act of over-the-top 'brotherly love' seemed more deathly than her actual illness.

In the end though, Lenalee had decided to purposefully forget about the illness, and to simply go on living her life as if it wasn't even there. She had found clever ways to combat the many signs of her dying body, like stuffing toilet paper in her panties to stop the blood from soiling her skirts, or drinking a spicy ginger tea mixture that Jerri had insisted would alleviate her cramping when she had told him she'd been running around 'just a little too much' that day. But, despite battling her death with such confident counter-measures, Lenalee just couldn't quite ignore the insatiable inner knowledge that she was dying. Quite frankly, she was beyond terrified about it. She fought hard, though, to tame her anxiety.

However, after a week or so, the vaginal bleeding stopped. The poisonous mood swings stopped. The vicious cramping cycles, they stopped too. Everything had suddenly just stopped. She had actually started to think she had been cured, that somehow, someway, her body had miraculously fixed her ovaries and soothed their tattered, over-stretched muscle, and that the leaking blood vessel squirting blobs of gooey blood into her underwear had been astoundingly patched up. Perhaps she really had been fully repaired. She was back to normal. The black clothes that she had once loved no longer looked terrible on her anymore. Her underwear, they no longer had to be filled with flimsy layers of toilet paper anymore. She was going to be okay!

And then, four months later, it happened again.

Lenalee was dying. Again. She hadn't been fixed. She hadn't been cured. She was back to dying, as, once again, she fingered the viscous red fluid shimmering atop her panties. Having blood dripping out of your vagina with heavy, slimy globbiness couldn't be a very healthy sign. She was undeniably dying.

She was... dying… dying…

"I really thought I was dying," Lenalee whispered, her own voice almost too embarrassed to repeat the words, to relive the unnecessary terror.

"So, how did you find out you weren't actually dying?"

"The nurse broke the news to me," the answers were just pouring out now, sliding joyously off her tongue as they fought to be heard by understanding ears. "I had been put in the hospital after a pretty rough mission, and, after they had given me a thorough examination, the nurse came over and offered me a new pair of underwear." She felt her cheeks crinkle up slightly. "After that, the truth about my 'illness' was revealed."

"And did you ever tell your brother?"

"No," she dug her toes into the floor. "I didn't want to have to worry him about something so trivial."

Alice was looking at her with a sympathetic glimmer. "You're a pretty brave girl, you know?"

Lenalee didn't want to respond to a compliment she hardly believed in. "But I still don't understand why I have to get so emotionally distraught every time my period comes..."

"Oh honey," Alice raised her voice dramatically, "That's so normal! We all feel like that when we get our period!"

The gravity of the news corrected her understanding rather bluntly. "It... it is?"

"Hell yes!"

A jewel of hope had sprung up in Lenalee's mind. "Then, is that why I act all weird around Allen lately?"

Her heart cowered a little as Alice let loose a hearty chain of giggles. "Oh god no!" The giggling continued, steadily growing in annoyance. "Honey..." Scooping both of Lenalee's hands into her own, Alice lifted her to her feet, her rich mocha eyes winking with devilish sweetness as they peered deep into her own violet choked orbs. "You're in love."

This time it was Lenalee's turn to laugh; Alice had proclaimed the statement with such conviction, such powerful faith and belief and committal, that she almost felt bad for laughing at such a poorly assumed fact. Did she seriously take her for being some kind of hopelessly naïve love virgin or something?

"You're pretty funny Alice," Lenalee sniggered. "I mean, that's such a huge lie, it's really not even—" something wasn't feeling right. Her laughter, it suddenly felt rather heavy, like trying to laugh while lifting a giant weight over your head, or trying to laugh at a joke that you didn't even understand, or, better yet, trying to do both those things without the slightest bit of congenial legitimacy. Suddenly, the laughter didn't seem so genuine anymore...

A firework of anxiety fizzled inside Lenalee's head; she really didn't have a solid, comprehendible answer to that.

"I... I..." the words protruding from her mouth sounded oddly foreign, almost like they were too big for her lips to mouth. "I—"

The sudden shrieking of the door mercilessly murdered the privacy; Allen Walker was in the doorway, nothing but a pair of baby blue boxers covering his pasty skin. He looked as if he was on a murderous shopping spree. "WHERE ARE THEY?"

Alice's expression immediately turned to a look of prize-winning dumb-blonde vacuity. "Whatever do you mean, Allena-chan?"

"MY CLOTHES."

"Oh please, you're wearing your cutesy little boxers—"

"MY REAL LIFE MALE CLOTHES, ALICE."

"Ugh, honey, those were so unflattering—"

"ALICE WHERE ARE THEY?"

"Silly Allena-chan, how am I suppo—"

"LINK SAID YOU DID IT."

"Ugh, Linky-kins, how could he?"

Under any normal circumstances, Lenalee would've been hacking her guts up in laughter right about now; however, as she witnessed Allen and Alice's bantering spitfire, an unusual desire numbed her habitual instincts, freezing her core and making her heart shiver and her blood rich with ice splinters. It almost felt that, if she dared move, dare do something even a teensy bit uncharacteristic of herself, her entire body would rupture into a splintery fountain of ice shards, leaving her broken body to melt and pool into the ground where it would forever whisper ringed liquid secrets. Her emotions had become an iceberg, fractured into icy fragments that floated with heavenly isolation throughout her body, little bits of mirror, bitingly, bitingly cold mirror, that bobbed up and down, up and down, as the voices around her rang like worn-out sound waves, distant and muffled.

"Allen-kun."

All sounds had become crisp again, yet her voice, it had acted impulsively. It had spoken with that same impetuous twinge, taking her vocal cords hostage and forcing them to say things they didn't really mean. Or at least, maybe not knowingly meant…

Even so, she could hardly remain stuck on such bothers as she caught Allen's face soften at the sound of her voice. Apparently disengaged from his argument, his expression changed from his previous look of overblown masculine rage to that of pure Allen Walker, flashing between thankfulness, guilt, and desperation within the span of one second before finally settling on an entertainingly cute combination of all three. He was so unexpectedly typical.

"Allen-kun, I'll help you find some clothes."

A tornado of butterfly wings began to assault her stomach. Although really, her nervousness felt more like carnivorous moths laying eggs along her stomach walls than the normal flu-like symptoms elicited by those nervous species of butterflies that tickle the stomach into a state of woozy discomfort. She hadn't a clue what she was doing. Not a clue. And she also didn't know where she was going to take Allen. But the opportunity to spend a little time with him, even if she wasn't quite sure why she even wanted such a chance, was rather ideal.

"Aww, come on Lena-chan," Alice was apparently unhappy with the idea of removing her nudity victim from out under her eyes. "You'll ruin all the fun if you take him away!"

"He'll catch cold if he stays like this Alice," Lenalee remarked as she weaved her fingers into Allen's hand (who , she couldn't help but roll her eyes at, was currently looking around as if the entire room was blinking florescent-colored obscenities). With a tug, she led the nearly naked exorcist through a back door and into the (thankfully) empty hallways of Asian branch.

Her intuitive sense of direction quickly led her down some sort of path.

"Good thing nobody will see you like this, hey Allen-kun?" Lenalee gave him a quick wink before picking up her pace, the need to achieve privacy before someone disturbed the barrenness of the hallways quite substantial.

Allen just blinked back at her, raw perplexity paling his face into a look of confusion. "But, Lenalee, where... why..."

She rendered him unable to speak by sharply turning a corner, leading them into a cramped hallway vacant of any other living creatures besides themselves. Lenalee increased her velocity, turning a completely unprepared Allen's voice into a stretched-out screech. She tried her absolute hardest not to lose focus and laugh, for fear of accidentally letting go of Allen and causing him some rather severe head trauma.

A mauve door a little ways ahead caught the attention of her radar.

"Let's go in here, shall we?"

She didn't even allow Allen a chance to mutter one of his bewildered queries before she had tugged him into the room, its mauve door thrown open and shut in a matter of seconds. Darkness was spilling across every corner of the room, providing both an assurance of privacy and that hint of uncertainty classically generated by all hues of darkness.

"Lenalee," Allen sounded genuinely puzzled. "Do you really know where we are right now?"

In an attempt to avoid his question for at least a few seconds, she began fingering the wall for any traces of a light source. "Not really."

"Oh."

Silence. Silence that competed with the stark darkness of the darkness. Light years and light years of it. They both knew what had just happened. Lenalee knew that Allen knew. Allen knew that Lenalee knew. They both knew, even despite the obscure veil of darkness, the fact that absolutely no male clothing source was located in the room that they were in. It was as painfully obvious as a padlock with the code taped to the back. Yet still, somehow, the darkness rendered them both speechless.

Suddenly, Lenalee felt her fingers brush past the tinny features of an oil lamp.

"Oh! I think I found—"

With the grace of watery jello she went crashing to the floor, her foot lodged against something hard and painfully solid.

"Uhh, fuck..." she bit her lip as pain gnawed her foot senseless. "Dammit..."

His warmth reached her faster than she had anticipated. Or perhaps, faster than she had been braced for. "Are you okay, Lenalee?"

His voice was so soft and quiet. So perfectly, perfectly, soft and quiet.

The situation, it felt so ridiculously cliché; instead of verbalizing her condition, Lenalee placed her hand delicately atop Allen's, its warmth igniting a sort of craving within her to simply fall into his arms and wrap herself in his aural blanket. She lifted her hand blindly, her fingers grazing the surface of Allen's face with hesitant tenderness.

"Allen-kun..."

The awkward moment of beauty was brusquely interrupted by the estranged squealing of the door.

"H-HEY!" Lenalee nearly face-planted as Allen went sprinting for the door. "DON'T CLOSE IT! PLEASE DON'T—"

Too late. The clicking of the door's lock clearly signified that it was too late.

They had been locked in.

Or...

"Allen-kun," Lenalee breathed, her eyes wide despite the room's bleary hue. "Allen-kun, we can get out right? We can... we can... get... out..."

She waited as Allen fiddled with what she assumed was the lock. The fiddling intensified after a few moments, until it had reached a climatic level of fiddling that indicated something was most likely not functioning as it was intended to. Her body temperature dropped a few degrees.

"Allen-kun... is something wrong... with the door?" the words slithered anxiously from her mouth. "Allen-kun?"

"Uh, Lenalee..." his voice had adopted a heavy sort of strength, as if he were about to report the number of casualties in a war. "There's no lock on this door."

"What do you mean there's no lock?" panic strangled her voice into a high-pitched squeak. "There's always locks on the insides of doors Allen-kun, that's just common sen—"

"But there isn't one, Lenalee."

Even amidst the darkness, Lenalee could see Allen slowly turning to face her, the stiffness attained when one realizes they are in a completely helpless situation making his movements jerky and uncoordinated. "Lenalee?"

"Allen-kun," her voice shook with heavy disbelief. "How can there possibly not be a lock," she took a raspy breath, "when we just heard somebody LOCK IT?"

"I, uh…"

"Be quiet and let me—" Lenalee's attempt at feeling the locked door's lockless lock for herself ended in complete failure as her boobs smashed against the ground, the floor staring up at her and a steadily intensifying pain jabbing at her foot.

"What the fuck…"

Her forehead met the ground with a stony smash. She could hear Allen uselessly pissing around with what should have been a god damn lock, but she knew… oh she knew… they were in Asian Branch for fuck's sake. They did everything backwards. Was it really that fucking strange for there to be a door that only locked from the outside, and couldn't be locked from within?

"There's nothing there, Lenalee."

Of all the fucking things.

…..

Those damn Asian branchers.

A/N: ... I'm sorry about the whole lock, thingy. I realized after I wrote it that its kinda impossible to get locked in from the inside of a room, so, I ever so kindly ask you... PLEASE IGNORE MY IDIOCY AND USE YOUR IMAGINATION! Because that's what fanfic is all about, ne? 8D

And also, I actually had a really good time writing about Lenalee first getting her period... I know, that sounds weird, but it was fun for me nonetheless. And poor poor Allen-kun... I should really give him a break, I mean, look what's going on in the manga! GAHHHH I won't even start on that...

Well minna, let us hope that I can get out the next chapter sometime in the near future. Not that anyone probably really cares, but ya, I'll perservere!

Huge thank yous go out to everyone who has reviewed, faved, and watched this story, most especially to those loyal readers who have stuck with me and this story since the very beginning. YOU ALL KNOW WHO YOU ARE! And of course, all reads/reviews/faves/watches are very much so welcome and appreciated!

The author would like to thank you for your continued support. Your review has been posted.